Saturday, October 22, 2011

The
Aims of Education

Earlier
this year, results from a national test showed that less than one
third of all elementary and high school students were proficient in
science. 40% of 12th graders tested at the very lowest level in
science. Recent tests of school children in Massachusetts showed very
discouraging results.

I
am quite sure that many people who deplore the continuing
deterioration of American education are perfectly sincere in their
worries. They expect our schools to benefit all children by helping
them learn as much as possible.

But
at the same time it becomes clearer all the time that many of our
leaders hold a very impoverished idea about the goals of American
education.

Not
too long ago it was a commonplace that education in the humanities
was a essential to develop the minds of students. Knowledge of
literature, of the arts and of philosophy was thought to make young
people articulate, creative, and clear thinkers. Hence liberal
education was considered an important part of everyone's education.
The aim of education was to create well-rounded persons
equipped to live their lives as well as possible.

In
recent years the rhetoric has changed. We do not hear much anymore
about the desirability of well-rounded persons. Today,
everyone from the president on down repeats that the goal of
education is to produce a workforce for the
coming years. Our leaders no longer seem interested in the
development of the capacities of all young people to be creative,
articulate and clear thinking citizens. The only purpose education
serves now is to prepare people to do a job.

Now
it is quite obvious that there are very different jobs in this world.
Many jobs are quite routine, the person doing the job has to be good
at taking orders, and to fit into a complicated bureaucratic machine.
Their main virtue is to follow rules, to go by the book. People who
do jobs like that do not need to be articulate. They do not need to
be creative or think for themselves. If they did, they might not like
their job and might prove to be difficult employees.Better that the
people destined to fill routine and bureaucratic jobs should be
thoughtless, poorly educated, and not particularly knowledgeable.

In
line with this change in thinking about education, the University of
Nevada has abolished its philosophy department. Howard University
came very close to doing the same thing. The State University of New
York in Albany abolished its foreign language departments.

These
are just the beginnings of moving against traditional liberal
education. In our world where business calls the shots, education no
longer is intended to make persons the most capable they can be so
that they can have good lives. The role of education now is to
provide a workforce for business. Best are workers with limited
education who will not complain if their jobs are stupid and boring
because their education prepared them for boredom, for doing as they
are told and to accept orders from above.

For
many students the aim of education is to produce competent drones
that are not rebellious but do as they are told.

But
wait! Are these drones at work not also citizens? Are they not
parents whose job and ambition it is to raise their children to be
intelligent, eager to learn and independent thinkers? But we are no
longer hearing about that.

Business
calls the shots. Business wants drones. Business does not care about
democracy; it prefers docile, ill informed citizens who are easily
manipulated by advertisers.

Corporations have a lot more
money to spend on political campaigns than you and I. They can engage
in a lot more and a lot louder political speech than you and I. In
fact this court case may well intensify the corporate ability to
drown out citizens' political opinions. Corporations are now the most
important “citizens” that get the best hearing because they can
yell louder than anyone else.

It is time to rethink corporate
personhood.

Obviously, corporations are not
persons. Would you like your daughter to marry one? The fact that
corporations will not come to your back yard barbecue to drink beer
and talk about the Red Sox is only one indication that this corporate
personhood is, indeed, a fiction.

More significant even is that
persons are moral beings. We do not always do what is morally
right, but the question of morality is always there.

Persons do not only have
rights; they have responsibilities. Persons owe gratitude to their
benefactors, they have obligations to their parents, and their
children. They have civic obligations. They are morally obligated to
contribute to the community in which they live, that provided
schooling for them, that protects them and their property.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Free Market

We hear daily about the blessings of the free market. But we hear a lot less about its limitations. In practice it is well understood that some things do well if traded in a market. Other things, we believe firmly, should not be traded.

Human beings should not be bought and sold. We oppose slavery. We oppose human trafficking in sex slaves and domestic servants. We do not allow parents to sell their children.

We are ambivalent (confused ?) about buying and selling education. Yes, there are for- profit schools. They are often unsuccessful. Yes, the children of the rich can get a better education than the children of rest of us. But we also spend significant amounts of public money to educate everyone, regardless of their income. The same is true of health care. The wealthy get better care. No doubt. But a good deal
of public money is spent to pay for at least some health care for everyone.

If you think about it, we believe in the free market within definite limits. Not
everything should be traded in the market.

Where the market does not serve everyone, other means must be taken to meet
legitimate needs. According to the Declaration of Independence we are all entitled to “life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Where the market does not serve those rights, we need to make other arrangements.

Commodities traded in a market yield a profit for the traders. But some items we think should not be traded for a profit, such a human beings, health care, education, controlled substances.

Our recent experience suggests two other items that should also be removed from the market: political power and savings.

There should not be a market in political power. Political power should not be for sale.
It should be illegal to trade in political influence.

Last year the Supreme Court decided that corporations—being persons before the law
—should not be limited in how much money they spend to express their political opinions. They should be able to spend as much money in politics as they choose. Global corporations
have much greater resources than ordinary citizens. In that decisions the Supreme Court completed a development, long in the making, that the country would, in effect, be run by the
very rich.

That is so obvious a betrayal of what we think and say we stand for—democracy—that
it must be reversed. We need to take politics out of the market place. We need to take the market traders out of politics.

When you retire, Social Security will not pay you enough to live, let alone comfortably. We are hence encouraged to save for our old age. So you put your money in the bank. The bank uses the money to speculate in dot.com stocks, in bad mortgages, in whatever. When the bubble bursts the economy is in recession, you loose your job and can no longer save for your old age.

It is clear that savings of ordinary citizens should not be available to banks to make
risky investments. Savings should be taken out of the market. Today cooperative banks are essentially not for profit enterprises. They are associations of citizens who want to have a place to keep their savings and to manage them. All banks should be not for profit. If the bankers have money of their own they want to risk in the hope of getting rich quick, that is their privilege. But please do not use MY money for that.

Markets are extremely useful for a number of reasons. But not everything is suitable for trading in a market. There should be no market in education: everyone should have an even chance at the
very best education they can use. We are all equally entitled to pursue our happiness and equally entitled to be as well equipped for that, as possible.

There should be no market in health care. There should no market in our savings. We are all equally entitled to life.

We are all entitled to freedom. Political participation should not be for sale to the
highest bidder.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

The Wall Street protests in New York City are entering their eighth week. During the early days you only heard about it on e-mail, from friends, from the Internet. The newspapers ignored it.

But now the protests spread to other cities, including Boston. 24 persons were arrested there for refusing to leave the Bank of America building. 700 people were arrested in New York City.

This is a real movement and can no longer be swept under the rug. Of course, the newspapers all hurry to dismiss it as foolish. "They have no clear goals," the journalists write.

No clear goals? The protesters want jobs. They want affordable health insurance. They want to have as much power as Wall Street and the large corporations. What's not clear about that?

The papers never accuse the tea party of lacking clear goals. Smaller government and few other government regulations seem perfectly clear. Is it any clearer than 'jobs and health insurance'?

Thousands of New York's finest came out to protect Wall Street. In Boston the police spokesperson is quoted as saying: "When they break the law, we arrest them."

That's really reassuring. But where was the police when Wall Street manipulated the economy into a deep and stubborn recession? Did they arrest anyone?

Well no, because that's not against the law. That's just capitalism. The big operators in the financial industry can take every crazy risk and ruin the lives of many of their fellow citizens. That's not illegal.Why is it not illegal? It seems to me that it should be.

But then I remember the golden rule: "He who has the gold, makes the rules."

And, of course, he who has the gold has been newspapers in his pocket.

The occupied Wall Street protesters want that changed. They want American democracy to be returned to the people.

Monday, October 3, 2011

Small
Government – what is the price?

Small
government is all the rage and there are times when that seems like a
good idea. Many government regulations seem not only unnecessarily
onerous, but somehow misconceived. In plain English they impose
regulation where the government has no business regulating.

But
looked at more carefully, all the talk about smaller government is
not well thought out. One needs to begin by asking what does the
government do; the list of functions of the US government is very
large indeed. Here are some items on that list:

The
government builds schools, roads, airports. It provides for essential
avenues of traffic and communication without which our economy could
not function.

The
government provides the system of justice, it organizes periodic
elections. The government provides police, prosecutors, and prisons.

The
government takes care of relations to other nations. That involves,
on the one hand, the military. It involves on the other hand customs
and immigration. It keeps track of citizens, provides passports for
foreign travel and for the naturalization of immigrants.

The
government assures us that food is safe because it inspects butcher
shops, restaurants, dairies and food processing plants.

The
government regulates banking, investments and stock markets.

The
government conducts space exploration. It supports the arts and
sciences through the National Endowment for the Arts and the National
Science Foundation.

The
government is intimately involved in caring for public health through
monitoring, through vaccinations, and support of research.

This
is a partial list but it is quite impressive. Yes we pay a lot in
taxes but we do receive a generous return.

There
are two ways of making the government smaller. The first is simply to
end certain activities or services. The other is to privatize them,
that is to have them performed by for-profit organizations.

Consider
the first one. Ever since the days of Ronald Reagan the mantra has
been that government is the problem and we should shrink government.
Along those lines Congress abolished a number of limitations on
financial dealings and weakened government supervision of
investment. Banks could now also make speculative investments. The
result was an enormous financial collapse caused by institutional
investors taking crazy risks in order to make more money. A
significant number of banks still have an uncertain future. The
economy is in terrible shape. Unemployment is still about 9%.
Government regulation of the financial sector is essential.

Consider
what would happen if we abolished government meat inspection,
government control of alcohol products. How many people would die of
food-borne illnesses? Shall we close schools or close our police
departments? Shall we stop building and maintaining roads and
bridges?

There
are, we are finding out, a significant number of government services
that we cannot do without. To that extent small government is not a
possibility.

But
– say the advocates of shrinking the government – the services
could better be performed by private, for-profit companies.

One
example of privatization should make us think twice about this
proposal. Many states have privatized their prison systems. These
companies make more money if there are more prisoners with longer
sentences. In several states private prison companies have lobbied
the Legislatures to extend their sentences for various criminal
offenses. The privatization of prisons has led to the interference by
private companies in the legislative process. It has produced a
draconian system of punishments that devastates lives.

Government
services performed by private companies for-profit are not always a
blessing. Add to that that many services performed by the government
can only yield a profit for private companies if they do an inferior
job. There are companies that try to make money by running schools.
But so far they have rarely succeeded and for-profit schools are
often understaffed.

There
are no indications that private for-profit health care is better than
health-care run by nonprofit organizations. The US has the most
expensive health care in the world but at least 15 countries do
better than we on basic health indicators such as life expectancy or
infant mortality rates.

Once
we look more closely at the project of shrinking government, we see,
on the one hand, that the government performs essential services.
Disaster ensues when we try to do without them. On the other hand,
privatization is often not a good prescription. In some cases it is
impossible because the service cannot make money. In other cases,
private companies can earn money by performing the service but their
doing so damages public interest.

We
will have to put up with the complicated government we have because
we live in a very complicated society.